Using the most current raw data from all 40 school districts in the state and the Utah Office of Education, independent public policy organization calculated per student expenditures for instruction, transportation, operations, capital and interest.

In addition, the report contains information on pupil/teacher ratios, teachers as a percent of personnel and property tax rates.

The highlights of the independent public organization's evaluation of the public school system's finacial practices includes the following:

Since 1987, the percent of operational spending that has been appropriated to instruction annually has fluctuated between 68 percent and 71 percent.

School districts have four major sources of revenues: property taxes, other local revenue such as fees and interest on account balances, state income taxes and state liquor tax (for school lunch), and federal dollars.

Property taxes are almost evenly split between operations and capital/debt service. State sources are almost entirely spent on operations as are two-thirds of federal revenue.

School district operations receive nearly 70 percent of its funding from the state income tax. Capital and debt service receive 86.5 percent of its funding from property tax with most of the remaining coming from state income taxes by way of the state capital outlay program. Nearly 50 percent of food service costs are funded by the federal government.

Statewide, 69.3 percent of school district operations are funded by state income taxes, but the variation on a district-bydistrict basis is quite large. Park City, for example, receives only 17 percent of its operations funding from the state while Tintic receives 90 percent of its operations funding from the state. This is attributable to high assessed property valuations per student in Park City and very low assessed valuations per student in Tintic.This combination allows more local property taxes to be spent per student which reduces the amount of state income taxes per student that the district receives.

Despite the very low growth in student expenditures in FY2003, school district expenditures per student have increased at a rate greater than inflation since 1997.